Tuesday, January 29, 2008

This is the the first main entry in a series of posts on how the NHL's on-ice product has evolved from before the lockout to 2007-08. The intro (about the increasing number of small defencemen in the league) can be found here.

Coming out of the lockout, the NHL undertook a comprehensive product review to improve the overall entertainment package, introducing some rule changes and then strictly enforcing others that had been previously left to slide. It was naive to think the officials and players could adapt overnight — and they didn't. But slowly, the officiating pendulum, which swung from one extreme to the other, is gradually settling into a comfortable middle ground.

The players suggest they are getting more latitude to battle without seeing a return to the rodeo-style defensive tactics that characterized the prelockout NHL.

Early last week, my boss came to me with a bit of a puzzler: Eric was working on a Saturday feature for all-star weekend on how the hockey being played in the NHL was better than it had been in a long, long time and we needed some stats or graphics to complement the story.

Could I come up with any?

Now, what exactly constitutes "better hockey" is a tough thing to quantify — especially numerically. One fan's great defensive battle might be considered a dud to another, and there are plenty of people within the game who even now debate the quality of hockey being played.

But if we were going to quantify how the game had improved postlockout, I thought, we'd have to first really get a handle on how officiating had changed. The new standards, after all, are the real defining alteration the league made coming out of a lost season, a change that has affected everything from the size of the players to the skills needed to be a successful team in the NHL.

What calls have characterized the "new" NHL? How has officiating changed? And have other violations gone by the wayside after an increased attention to hooking and obstruction?

Let's just say I owe a big debt of gratitude to Gabe Desjardins from Behind The Net, who was able to cull a lot of the raw data on penalty figures when I pestered him for it last week.

Here's a look at the penalty chart that I put together for Saturday's paper (click on it for a larger view):

It's probably no surprise to any hockey fan that hooking is the call of the day, but that's a pretty dramatic way of showing it.

The season right after the lockout, 2005-06, was all about the hooking call, as penalties — and by extension power plays — went through the roof as referees whistled down any minor tug or infraction with the stick. A few other calls were certainly on the upswing as well, but hooking went from 11 per cent of all calls on average (in the five years prelockout) to an incredible 27 per cent of all calls that first season.

That didn't make for good hockey.

As you can see from the chart above, however, hooking calls have been on a steady decline — and so have other obstruction-based calls such as tripping and holding. The six penalties on the above chart are actually the most pertinent when it comes to discussion how the calls have changed, as we can see dramatic swings in all of them.

Hooking, tripping and holding went up, way up, and roughing (which was previously the most called infraction), highsticking and slashing went way down. Highsticking was actually the third-most called penalty prelockout, behind roughing and hooking, and its all the way down to eighth this season — with little more than twice the number of highsticking penalties as puck over the glass calls.

The vigilant whistling of some minor infractions has limited the major ones called.

The sharp decline in hooking calls from 2005-06 until now has also resulted in another major change: This season, for the first time, there are actually fewer penalty calls per game than in the five prelockout years:

That first minor bump there, in 2000-01, was the NHL's first crackdown on stick fouls, one that resulted in a jump in the number of slashing calls. That was the year of Mario Lemieux's comeback, and there were plenty of articles then, too, that trumpeted the brief return of free-flowing hockey.

Goal scoring took a big jump of its own in 2005-06, but that's no surprise given how often teams were on the power play. It's been underpublicized this season just how dramatic the dropoff in penalty calls has been, but the numbers certainly back it up — and that's with the increased number of fighting majors counting in the column.

Speaking of which, I also discovered that there's a bit of an inverse relationship between the number of hooking calls and the number of fighting majors in an NHL season:

My guess would be that, with fewer power plays and penalty kills, the league's various enforcers have more time on the ice to rendezvous — although I think this one's certainly open to interpretation.

The raw figures tell a similar story to the charts above. Here is a look at the top 10 penalty calls from prelockout, postlockout and this season so far:

Prelockout (99-04)

Penalties

Percent

Rank

Roughing

2048

14.47%

1

Hooking

1552

10.96%

2

Hi stick

1405

9.93%

3

Fighting (maj)

1393

9.84%

4

Tripping

1274

9.00%

5

Holding

1246

8.80%

6

Interference

1171

8.27%

7

Slashing

976

6.90%

8

Cross check

647

4.57%

9

Holding stick

449

3.17%

10

New NHL (05-07)

Penalties

Percent

Rank

Hooking

4140

26.35%

1

Holding

1765

11.23%

2

Tripping

1723

10.97%

3

Interference

1356

8.63%

4

Roughing

1302

8.29%

5

Hi stick

1044

6.64%

6

Fighting (maj)

953

6.06%

7

Slashing

659

4.19%

8

Cross check

419

2.67%

9

Puck over glass

358

2.28%

10

This season (07-08) **

Penalties

Percent

Rank

Hooking

2784

21.14%

1

Tripping

1482

11.25%

2

Holding

1424

10.81%

3

Fighting (maj)

1250

9.49%

4

Roughing

1242

9.43%

5

Interference

1076

8.17%

6

Slashing

816

6.20%

7

Hi stick

788

5.98%

8

Cross check

399

3.03%

9

Puck over glass

334

2.54%

10

** prorated

Please note that about 12 to 13 per cent of the calls aren't included here, a group of penalties that includes things like misconducts, diving, unsportsmanlike conduct, charging, boarding and elbowing.

What do these Top 10 figures tell us? Well, fighting's back to almost normal, for one. Crosschecking, meanwhile, is another of those stick foul calls that's well down.

In his piece, Duhatschek talks about Rick Nash's highlight reel goal from a week ago, a series of events at the end of a tie game that likely wouldn't have been possible four years ago. After all, if a referee's twice as likely to call a hooking call in a game, what chance is there a player will take to waterskiing behind an attacker?

What's interesting to contemplate is, with hooking calls falling so precipitously, just how much further can penalties decline? And at what point does the decrease in the number of power plays really begin to pull down the number of goals scored (more so than it has already, that is)?

When do the calls level off and what then does the game look like?

Part 2 is on "the young stars," and I'll do my best to have it up early on tomorrow.

16 Comments:

One doesn't have to refer to a chart to see that wherever the game of NHL Rodeo was played pre-lockout, My New Human Pinball NHL is played mostly along the boards, from the mid-circle to behind the net. The crowning achievement came last Saturday on HNIC when Pinhead had Lindy Ruff draw it up on the "chalkboard" so the minor hockey players could practice it. It might be different. And maybe different penalties are being called. But it's just as unwatchable as ever.

One aspect of the changes is that players have room to manoeuvre, so that come-backs are more prevalent than before the lockout. Unfortunately I don't have data on the subject. However, I remember getting bored out of my skull frequently during pre-lockout games as teams were unable to generate anything due to all the uncalled tackling.

Holding of a certain variety is legal in football (between the shoulders, etc.). No such exemption exists in hockey, but refs were ignoring holds that would have been called in football. It was ridiculous. Refs didn't want to "decide" games (never mind that ignoring a penalty decides things in itself...). Add in their pre-lockout aversion to call anything late in games, and come-backs were rare.

As your charts show, the game doesn't have as many penalties anymore, even compared to pre-lockout. Players and refs have adjusted. The difference is that players now have some room out there, so come-from-behind wins are more likely.

In my book, that alone makes post-lockout hockey better than the frequent snooze-fests in pre-lockout "hockey". There was almost no point in playing the full 60 minutes. "First goal wins" was generally sufficient. Not anymore. Thankfully.

What I would be interested in seeing is how the calls break down by period, or by "phases" of the game - ie: in the last ten minutes of the third vs. the first ten minutes of the second. As much as we like to argue the players have more room, I've noticed that the ole second rulebook for the last half of the third seems to have returned.

It'd also be interesting to see how many come-from-behind third period wins have occurred this year as opposed to last year or 2005-06. I'm willing to bet it has gone down for the same reason.

I can't really look at this data and say that the game is better off for it. While there might be more room out there to move, the new standard has also given rise to the new breed of divers. It's sickening to see how many guys are just flopping because they know the officials are too scared to make the right call. Instead, they will make the safe call, and nail the other player for the "hook". Worst case scenario, both players go. There really is nothing to lose by taking a dive.

And speaking of Nash's goal, I think that is a horrible example of the "new NHL", myself. Two idiots standing around trying to stick check aren't going to be very effective. If either one just takes the body, that goal doesn't happen. New NHL, old NHL, doesn't matter. When you are stationary, you get burned.

I just wasn't very clear--I meant that when the new rules were introduced, there was an increase in even-strength rates.

Since then, however, I think the rates have been on the decline (compared to 05-06, not 03-04). Looking at 3 years ago vs. this year, I think the number of even-strength goals is roughly the same, but with less power plays (more even-strength time), it suggests a lower rate.

Hell, I'll never be clear on this. But my statement about the decline was in reference to the first post-lockout year, not the last pre-lockout one.

I would also like to see a graph of penalties per period. I think that one of the best changes made was that the referees began calling penalties based on whether an infraction occured, rather than who's turn it was next, what the score was and how much time was left in the game.When ref's manage the penalties you can get away with tons of junk at those times when penalties are not called. Also, as more and more people use their sticks for waterskiing, the ref's wouldn't nab them all because they rationed their penalties.When they call the game consistently it's a lot better for the game.

The statistics showing the decline in penalty calls this season show that the NHL's initial assumption that the players would learn and adapt to the post-lockout rule standards was correct. And I would like to say...finally. Finally the NHL made a change and gained the desired outcome. And credit the players for making the necessary changes in their game because watching a sixty minute game with forty minutes worth of power plays got old pretty quickly.

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About Me

A sportswriter at The Globe and Mail, James covers the NHL and the game of hockey. He is a member of the Professional Hockey Writers' Association, a radio and TV analyst with TSN and was the NHL network manager at SB Nation from 2008 to 2010. A graduate of Thompson Rivers and Ryerson universities, James grew up in Kamloops, B.C. — one of Canada's great hockey cities — and was a season ticket holder in the Blazers' glory years.

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